[deadfece]

The article honestly reads as if written by a very smart sysadmin with zero cloud experience.

1:1 lift and shift is always obscenely more expensive. In this case, if the author had been in charge of the migration, then yes, the services would have cost them dearly to operate in the cloud.

I'm sure if I was personally put in charge of moving some aspect of IT into an unfamiliar mode of operation, my inexperience there would make my approach insanely expensive as well.

That says nothing about the target, except that having undertrained and inexperienced staff in charge of its design and implementation is probably foolish from a financial perspective.

There are obviously thousands on thousands of scenarios where moving to commodity cloud is an absolute slam dunk in aspects that are important to the subject business.

Unfortunately we really get no insight into what the workload truly is in the article's comparison. There's no mention of solution aspects like app architecture, security, HA/DR, SLA, RTO/RPO, security or backups [1]. We only get what is plainly a tunnel-vision view of a comparison.

It's almost like the author doesn't make solutions for a living.

Maybe the author actually realizes their blind spot, and is secretly utilizing Cunningham's law to crowd-source a relatively free solution from the professionals and amateurs in the internet comments sections.

The good architects don't work for free. There's a reason why Troy Hunt's web services cost him vanishingly little to operate, and it's certainly not by running IaaS VMs 24x7x365.

[1] I mentioned security twice as part of an ongoing effort to make up for all the times CyberSec/Infosec teams have been forgotten in the planning process. =P

[pinkgolem]

>There's a reason why Troy Hunt's web services cost him vanishingly little to operate

And I thought that's because he is on a cloudflare premium plan with a workload where 99,8% of requests are cached

[bcaxis]

> 1:1 lift and shift is always obscenely more expensive.

Is it? Managed services cost a lot more than a vm. Re writing software cost a lot more.

Where are the savings?

[tracker1]

Fewer IT staff for systems mgt. Reduced costs in off peak hours with on-demand instances. Right sizing resources to application needs.

There are wins that one can have, but nothing is guaranteed. It will vary by application, size and staff.

[bcaxis]

> Fewer IT staff for systems mgt

This hasn't been my experience. Replace sysadmin with cloud engineer/architect, salary bump, no reduction in quantity. This assumes you are mildly competent as an organization.

On managed services, say the database. My experience is that the extra costs of the service are larger (usually much much larger) than any salaries or head count reduction. I'd rather employ more people than not, and actually control my data, given the choice. Particularly when the savings are questionable or false.

I generally prefer a lower dependency count. Code and vendor. Even at modest immediate cost increases, you gain better flexibility and there are less things to bite you.

> Reduced costs in off peak hours with on-demand instances.

Agreed. You do increase system complexity to accomplish it. But there are actual cost savings here.

> Right sizing resources to application needs.

This isn't unique to cloud, you can do this in any hypervisor. This is a basic feature.

> There are wins that one can have, but nothing is guaranteed

It does not "always" hold. This is critical missing nuance in the original claim.